Customization methodology of a Coarse Grained Reconfigurable architecture

摘要

Mapping algorithms on CGRAs can lead to an inefficient implementation and hardware under-utilization if there is a mismatch between the granularity of reconfigurable processing unit and the algorithm. In this paper, we introduce a tool that takes the hardware configuration of a set of applications, identifies the unused parts of the CGRA, and let the user sweep the design space from fully programmable to fully customized by eliminating the unused components. User can select among multiple design points according to the application specification. This method is very useful to design multi-mode ASIC accelerators. The fully customized hardware generated using our tool has a negligible area and power overhead compared to the equivalent ASIC but can be generated significantly faster.